Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(88)

“Hey, Connie,” Marvin said, edging his way between them. “Don’t be giving her so much grief. Responding units were on their way, but if Ms. Winkleman here hadn’t acted in a timely fashion, our homicide suspect would have made good on her getaway.”

Mr. Jones was not mollified. “That damned snowplow not only wrecked my gate, it yanked two of the posts completely out of the ground, and it’s going to cost a good five thousand bucks to fix it.”

“And you know that because,” Marvin observed, “unless I’m sadly mistaken, a city-operated snowplow took out that very same gate sometime last year. I understand that you’ll have to deal with all kinds of paperwork. I’m sorry about that, but for right now how about if I have my guys help your guys set up a temporary barrier? Then we’ll need to haul that Piper out of the weather into an empty hangar so it can be impounded and processed for evidence.”

“What about her?” Conrad wanted to know, sending a glower in Twink’s direction.

“Believe me,” Marvin assured him, “I’ll have all her information available should it be needed.”

“Okay,” Conrad grumbled, “but she hasn’t heard the last of this.”

As the airport manager and Marvin walked away to deal with the barrier issue, my cell phone rang in my pocket. A glance at caller ID told me Nitz was on the phone.

“Danitza?” I asked.

“No, it’s me, Mr. Beaumont—Jimmy,” was the reply. “Mom’s busy with the EMTs right now. She asked me to call you.”

“The EMTs!” I yelped in alarm. “What’s happened? Did your mom have an accident on her way to the hotel?”

“No,” Jimmy answered, “she’s fine. We’re at her dad’s place. The EMTs are working on him right now. When we got here and found him, he was un . . . un. . . .”

“Unresponsive?” I supplied.

I had been too preoccupied with everything else to call for a welfare check on Roger Adams, but clearly someone else had done so.

“Yes, that’s what he said,” a shaken Jimmy agreed, “unresponsive. As soon as we got inside the house and found him like that, Mom called 911. They’ll probably take him to the hospital. She wanted you to know what’s going on.”

I felt a sudden surge of anger. Shelley Adams had struck again—or at least she had tried to—on her way out of town.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come to the house as soon as I can, but there’s a bit of a hang-up on this end. If you wind up heading for the hospital before we arrive, call back and let me know.”

“Okay,” Jimmy murmured. “Will do.” He terminated the call.

The crowd around the Travelall had melted away along with Marvin Price and Conrad Jones, leaving just Twink and me. She was bent over, examining the damaged fender. She was also smoking a cigarette. What a surprise!

“Is it drivable?” I asked.

“It will be,” she said determinedly, “as soon as I hammer out the fender so it isn’t catching on the tire. Why, are you in some kind of hurry?”

I allowed as how I was. I told her about Jimmy’s call and said that I needed to get back to Diamond Ridge Road in one hell of a hurry. “I could probably ask one of Marvin’s patrol officers to give me a lift.”

“Hold your horses,” Twink growled at me. “Just give me a minute. I’ll have Maude here back in shape in no time.”

Marvin must have managed to work some kind of magic. By all rights the Travelall should have been impounded.

Twink had come to AJ’s wearing what passed as dress-up attire for her—a plaid western shirt, jeans, and a pair of cowboy boots. Within moments she had donned the gray coveralls she retrieved from the backseat and had ditched the cowboy boots for what I assumed to be a second pair of insulated work boots—probably stored in one of the boxes in the rooftop luggage rack

After wrestling her toolbox down to the ground, she opened the lid and extracted both a metal rod and a wooden mallet. She took those with her as she scrambled under the vehicle’s front end. For the next minute or two, a series of thumps—wood on metal—filled the air before Twink emerged once more.

“All good,” she announced before returning the rod and mallet to the toolbox and the toolbox to its designated place on the roof. “Now, do you want me to drive you like this or ditch the coveralls?”

It was dark, and as much of a hurry as I was in, she could have driven me stark naked for all I cared. “You’re fine,” I told her.

Thanks to the snowplow’s having done the heavy lifting, the trusty engine was damage-free, and it roared to life as soon as Twink turned the key in the ignition. When she put the vehicle in gear and we began to move, the ride was smooth as silk, with zero thumping or bumping. Obviously Twink’s two-minute hammer-and-tongs repair job had filled the bill.

“So what’s the deal?” she asked after we cleared the wrecked gate and were speeding along.

“Jimmy called from Roger’s house,” I told her. “He and his mom went there and found Roger unresponsive.”

“So are we going to the house or to the hospital?” she asked. “The hospital’s a lot closer.”

I called Nitz’s number, and Jimmy answered.

“Hullo.”